It seems that, from a climate and temperature perspective, that it would be best to host the Summer and Winter Olympic Games at relatively northern, cold-climate, cities.
The Winter Olympics, of course, by their nature have to be in a frigid climate, but in the hot summer, cities in the northern US, or Canada, or Scandinavia, etc., would afford a cooler temperature for events like the outdoors marathon.
Of course, hot-weather cities like Los Angeles have successfully done summer Olympics before, but it just seems that Seattle or Vancouver, etc., could have done well too with lower temperatures.
As an aside, it’s not exactly true that the Winter Games have to be held in a “Frigid” place, as evidenced by the fact that a number of Winter Games have, in fact, been held in places with mild winters - Vancouver, Squaw Valley, Sochi, Albertville, etc. The next Winter Games are in Pyeongchang, which isn’t very cold, and the one after that is in, weirdly, Beijing, also not very cold.
What’s critically important is that you have a place people can ski. You can make snow with machines; its not really important that it be super cold. And, of course, many events are held indoors. But you do need a mountain. There’s no getting around that. It would be much easier to hold a Winter Games in Sacramento, which is not too far from mountains, than in Winnipeg, which is very cold but nowhere near good skiing.
As a spectator though, I would infinitely prefer a “winter wonderland” a la Lillehammer’94 over a warm-weather setting where skiers compete against the backdrop of grey, snowless landscape. Thus, if it was up to me, the winter Olympics would always be held in locations with the highest probability of the former
Just last weekend, while switching TV channels, I briefly caught a cross-country (or possibly Nordic combined) skiing event on a track that had barely enough snow for a few skiers to go alongside each other. It looked very ugly. Hope to never see such a thing happening in the Olympics.
